Majoring in Technology

3 Tips on How to Make Your Twitter News Feed Suck Less

I recently followed my 1,000th person on Twitter (@tonykhue) a couple weeks ago. While I’m a huge fan of Twitter, there is one growing pain that I have noticed. There is a LOT of noise out there these days. Previously, whenever I opened Twitter for the first time in the morning, I’d find around 100 or so new tweets to read. It was a nice way to get a catch up on any news I had missed earlier. Now, it’s impossible to read every possible tweet from the people I follow. While the quality of information has stayed relatively the same, the noise factor has ratcheted up.

Determined to bring greater clarity and make Twitter more relevant, I set about to do some spring cleaning. Here’s what I did:

Create mute filters using Tweetbot

If you haven’t downloaded Tweetbot for iOS or Mac yet, do it now. Sure, you might think that the Mac version is expensive at $20. Considering how frequently I use Twitter however, the app has been worth my investment. If you use Twitter frequently throughout the day, you need Tweetbot.

Once you’ve downloaded Tweetbot, head over to the Mute filters tab, indicated by the chat bubble with the “X” inside it. Tweetbot lets you filter out tweets based on users, keywords, hashtags, and clients from your timeline and lists. Mentions are not muted though.

Take #nikeplus for example. I don’t give a shit that you just ran 4.85 miles with a 9 minute and 35 second mile average pace. Besides, why are you giving potential stalkers an exact route of your most recent run?

Here are the current filters I’ve created so far:

Click to enlarge

Organize your timeline into separate lists

Remember Twitter lists? That neglected feature that lets you add the people you follow into custom lists? While it hasn’t really caught on with most users, Twitter lists are great for people who follow hundreds or even thousands of people on Twitter.

I personally manage only a single Twitter list, which consists of people I actually know in real life, whom I’ve tweeted with, or whose tweets I never want to miss.

Rather than manually sort hundreds of people into lists, I recommend using Cloze for automatically managing a list of close contacts similar to the one I described above. Also, you might want to check out Slices for iOS and Android, which is a Twitter client that creates “slices” or categories of people you follow, allowing you to easily follow the topics you want to pay attention to right now.

Unfollow people using ManageFlitter

If someone you follow isn’t providing you with any value, then why are you still following them? You’ve probably encountered those chatter boxes that dominate your feed or who share obnoxious updates that makes you say “Seriously?”

Click to enlarge

ManageFlitter’s unfollow tool is one of the best I’ve used. It shows you people who aren’t following you back, lack a profile photo, or haven’t tweeted in a long time. With just a couple of clicks, ManageFlitter will save you a ton of time by quickly unfollowing a group of people for you.